Ultimately, it is up to each company to determine which traits are applicable to the job for which the baseline is being developed. For example, if the job is a sales position, certainly "Persuasive" would be an applicable, and justifiable, trait to consider. However, if it was for the job of a fork lift operator, persuasiveness may have noting at all to do with the job, and thus probably should not be considered in the baseline development. In order to maintain compliance with current U.S. laws, job applicability must be a factor when using a trait as a selection tool.
Management, including the supervisory and middle management staff who may oversee the job being profiled, should review the suggested baseline data from the most and least successful employees. Some traits will be the same or have significant overlap, and thus may not be a "distinguishing" trait between the most and least successful, even if it is an important trait.
There are almost always a few key traits that are distinguishably different between the most and least successful employees, and it would be those traits that Management should focus on to develop the final "baseline" file. For illustration purposes, we'll again use a sales position as our example, and we will assume, for this example, that the sales position requires a high level of customer relationship building and a long-term, repeat sale environment.
Suppose we found differences between the most and least successful people were that the most successful were less aggressive, more patient and more compassionate than the least successful people. Other traits were either similar between the most and least successful employees or weren't applicable for this job.
If this were the case, then those 3 criteria would be the "key" baseline file traits that would be the target for hiring new people or promoting others into that position. A "Baseline File" would be created and used each time an new Personality Profile was used for this sales position.